Women, feminism, and geek culture

Things I don’t have to linkspam about today (20th October, 2010)

Say hello to Ms Spam-Spam! We’ve put in a special account for linkspams to make it more clear that linkspams are a group effort here. All the old linkspams are now listed with this account too.

Most Big-Company Women CEOs Are Also Mothers. Sadly, this isn’t a sign that motherhood + career isn’t difficult: “The fact most big-company female CEOs have children may just state the obvious—that the highest achievers can handle big challenges”

Intui has a nice infographic up: Payroll by Gender: Who Makes More Money? Most of this is moderately well-known stats (at least within feminist circles), but it’s nicely put together and the section that gave pay divided up by gender and ethnicity was fairly interesting.

The Cranky Product Manager is cranky: “Software Sisters, add your own experiences in the comments!”

The Awesome Foundation is running a programming workshop for girls, which will have them “design, program, and produce their own video games based on situations, systems, or relationships in their own lives”.

If you have links of interest, please share them in comments here, or if you’re a delicious user, tag them “geekfeminism” to bring them to our attention. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

But even so, two worlds currently coexist here: the old men, rooted in the old ways, sitting at the top and doing what they can to maintain the status quo; and the new world, demonstrated by the surprisingly large number of young women at the conference — but almost all of those women sit behind the top table.

It’s a generational shift sitting in the same room. And you get the feeling that members of the old guard are clinging to symbols — the arcane procedures, the late-night meetings, the stubborn formality — while their world is gradually eroded by the determined efforts of others.

In that context, Kisrawi and others like him are determinedly demonstrating that they still retain power with their use of interventions, square brackets, and marathon stalling sessions. Unfortunately they are sadly unaware that the result of this effort to display virility is a frankly embarrassing public spectacle.

then goes on to mention the scantily-clad waitress at the nearby hotel, before concluding;

Nevertheless, you can’t help but wonder that if you took all the old men in the negotiating room out for dinner at the Hilton and left their female second-in-commands behind, we would all be heading home tomorrow morning with a full set of resolutions.

This is for the U.S., though. I’m not sure why “Asians” in the U.S. appear to make more money than whites, but in Ontario, Canada, most Asian groups make less than whites. So if you’re living in Australia, for example, the race and ethnicity stats might be different as well.

Even within the U.S., Asian groups are very diverse. For Asian immigrants, immigrants from one country may be primarily economic immigrants, while immigrants from another country may be primarily refugees, which is why you have general income differences based on ethnicity. Anyway, it’s complex.

If anyone lives in Seattle and is interested in doing a live version of the science fiction book club, Ada’s Technical Books is going to be doing one. You can contact me through Ada’s website: http://www.adasbooks.com